To explain the success of different distribution strategies in the life insurance industry, we analyze the performance of single- and multichannel distribution firms in the German life insurance industry. We estimate cost and profit efficiency for three groups of life insurers: multichannel...

Supervised dimension reduction methods have been extensively applied in different scientific fields like biology and medicine in recent years. However, they have hardly ever been used in micro economics, and in particular cost function modeling. Nonetheless, these methods can also be useful in...

The German Energiewende’s potential effects on the reliability of electricity supply as well as the corresponding economic consequences have recently entered both the political and scientific debate. However, empirical evidence of power outage costs in Germany is rather scarce. Following a...

Supply shocks in the global gas market might aff ect countries diff erently since the market is regionally interlinked but not perfectly integrated. Additionally, high supply side concentration might expose countries to market power in different ways. To evaluate the strategic position of...

By 2050, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 80 %. The EU member states have therefore declared to strongly increase the share of renewable energy sources (RES-E) in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities, there are two major impacts...